


Women of Independent Means

by scioscribe



Category: Bound (1996)
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 07:52:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11504973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Corky and Violet make their getaway slow.





	Women of Independent Means

They hadn’t been able to decide what direction to drive in. West, they’d eventually hit California—Los Angeles and San Francisco, lands of opportunity—but they’d have to drive through a whole lot of farm country first. Lots of corn and pretending to be sisters.

“No one’s going to believe we’re sisters,” Violet said. “It’s not that we don’t look alike, it’s the way we look at each other.”

“In some of these places, it’s maybe not that unusual to be fucking your sister,” Corky said. She took her hand off the wheel and put it on Violet’s thigh, high enough up where even Violet’s skin wasn’t always silky smooth, where she could feel a few fine hairs against her fingertips. “So there’s that, anyway. And it’s my turn to talk you into something.”

But they wound up killing time anyhow. It was something, Corky thought, that you could do best only at the extreme edges of things, when you were really rich or else really in the shit. She had killed a lot of time when she was away, after all. It was where she’d learned all that fix-it shit and where she’d realized she had a gift for vocations where fifty percent of the job was hardline technical expertise and the other fifty percent was just being willing to get your hands dirty. Home repair, theft, and screwing all worked by the same rules.

Same rules or not, the game was more fun with Violet, and she liked killing time with Violet just fine.

So they drove in widening circles—crop circles, Violet said, practicing for all the corn—and in cheap hotel rooms with busted ice machines, they made love on scratchy bed-sheets. Afterwards, Corky would sometimes sit with her back against the headboard and Violet reclined between her open legs, her head on Corky’s collarbone. Corky could see the two of them in the mirror with its painted gilt edges, could see her fingers stroking lazily over the red mark her mouth had left on Violet’s breast. Could see Violet’s lipstick in a sloppy smudge all over her own face.

“You never let me take you anywhere nice,” Corky said on one of these occasions, and Violet laughed. “Shithole motel after shithole motel.”

Violet circled her fingers around Corky’s knee. “I was always someone cheap somewhere expensive. I thought it’d be nice to have things the other way around.”

Corky could live with that. Besides, most people who get a lot of money get stupid about it, they blow a score that could have lasted them the rest of their lives in six months flat, but she figured Violet immunized her against that. Because she had all the usual vices—booze, gambling, women—but Violet satisfied them all, was one risky, intoxicating affair all on her own. So that was love. She turned that thought over and over again at night, looking up at those cracked hotel ceilings, imagining the conversations that would carry through the plumbing in some of these places. Love. Go figure.

Eventually, she’d have to start driving for real. They were both still waking up at loud footsteps and flinching at ringing telephones: the more miles between them and Chicago, between them and Mickey’s clippers, the better. They would eat up the miles. Violet would roll down her window and stick her hand out to feel the breeze.

People went west for the Gold Rush, once. Corky already had everything she wanted, but she never knew anybody who would turn down getting more. So with Violet asleep next to her, she closed her eyes and let herself dream of what was at the end of the road. A house, and a bed, and time. Maybe a new tattoo. This time, a name.


End file.
